1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a development environment used to design and develop a system LSI including, e.g., a configurable processor and, more particularly, to a method of generating a system LSI design/development environment and a medium which stores a program therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has recently emerged a variety of needs for LSIs applied to, e.g., multimedia processing. In addition, the market cycle of LSIs is short. For this reason, a demand has arisen for a system LSI design/development environment to develop an LSI optimum for an application in a short time. A development environment means hardware necessary for forming a system LSI or software such as system development support tools.
Generally, when an LSI carries a general-purpose processor, the hardware design cost is almost zero. However, since an LSI having such an arrangement is not optimized for an application, it is difficult to fully exploit the performance of the application. Recently, configurable processors capable of selecting an instruction or memory configuration have been provided. A configurable processor provider provides a system which outputs a hardware description capable of designating a configuration and creating a structure representation. According to such a processor and system, a processor having an arrangement optimum for an application can be developed in a short time by designating an optional instruction or memory size.
Normally, when an instruction set or the like is changed, software development tools such as a compiler and simulator must also be changed. Hence, a system which generates a software development tool together with a hardware description by designating a configuration is also provided. According to such a system, the labor and time required for designing a software development tool can be greatly reduced.
Conventionally, a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) coprocessor configurable with respect to a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) has been developed. However, this DSP coprocessor can use only an ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) prepared in advance. No other architecture can be used. There is also a configurable processor capable of adding new instructions, though the configurable processor can add only instructions of fixed type. For this reason, it is difficult to cope with an architecture such as a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word), and the flexibility is insufficient.
Additionally, to describe an additional instruction, an HDL (Hardware Description Language) such as Verilog is used. For this reason, an instruction cannot be efficiently added.
Furthermore, it is difficult to generate a necessary development environment from an instruction defined by a user. Hence, there is a demand for a system LSI development environment generation method capable of easily and flexibly generating a development environment of an LSI having high-performance hardware, and a medium which stores a program therefor.